I was just idling my time, trying to think of ways to make people happy on this overcast day, when I remembered my promise to write a fairy story.

As every educated person knows, the goings on in Faerie are complex and centre very much on the lives of people and the life of the world. The tales that come to us from the Fairies are therefore both complex and edifying.

They are complex in part because the natural laws of Faerie (both worldly and moral) are both comprehensive and strictly applied. For example, every deed ever committed eventuates on The Good, however evil the doer and his ways. The laws are also strictly rational ; though often wayward humans fail to penetrate the logic.

This failure to understand leads many people to imagine that stories from Faerie are fantastical. Indeed, that imagined fantasy is often the… Read more

Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold… The realm of the fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things : all manner of beasts and birds are found there ; shoreless seas and stars uncounted ; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril ; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost. (Tolkien)

JRR Tolkien was, by common consent, a master in the telling of tales. Also he was a leading expert on the history of the mediaeval English ; of Middle Earth, in fact. For what is The Shire, if not a rendering of mediaeval, essentially Saxon, England as it ought to have been – peaceful, joyful, gently prosperous and merrymaking ; a place where people (despite their petty squabbling) minded their own business and worked for the common weal and their own modest gains?

But The Shire is not Faerie ; at least, not to the hobbits. Faerie is to be found outside The Shire ; not far, but outside, nevertheless. And there in the old forest, to meet Tom Bombadil and Goldberry is to be in Faerie. Note that to meet Tom on one of his many visits to the inns and homes in The Shire is not to see him as of the Other World ; he is quite ordinary (if eccentric) on these visits.

No, to meet the real Tom Bombadil, you must enter his realm. And it is not enough merely to pass through the tunnel at Buckland and into the old forest ; nor is it enough merely to row or paddle up the Withywindle where it flows into the Brandywine river. Even to meet the white swan or the blue kingfisher is not enough ; and merely sheltering under the weeping fronds of the willow is insufficient. To meet the real Tom, to enter Faerie, you must be invited – even if you do not know that you have been invited ; and do not know whether it might be for good or for ill.

And, once in Faerie, one must be careful in thought, word and deed ; for things are only rarely what they seem to be.